So, what is this blog about you ask? Good question. For many years I found blogs silly. Even the name "blog" is silly.
However in the recent years I have had more and more trouble keeping organized with my adventures through the FOSS community. Also I have
come to the realization that it is a disservice to the community to spend hours working around bugs or configuring a
software package and not spreading the learned info in some manner or another. My response to these issues is what you
now see before you. Enjoy!

These are just some randoms tips from google and couple of mysql seminars that I attended.

I'll just show it as comments in the /etc/my.cnf.

#set to 80% of physical ram if you can
innodb_buffer_pool_size=2048M
#use direct i/o, but sometimes this will slow stuff
#down so benchmark between the two and see
innodb_flush_method=O_DIRECT
#enable the query cache, note oracle says not to
#do this but I found it gave my app better performance
query_cache_type = 1
#max size of query in cache
query_cache_limit = 5M
#total cache size
query_cache_size = 100M
#use one data file per table. otherwise all tables/databases will
#be in one giant file in /var/lib/mysql/ibdata
innodb_file_per_table=1

As a special note, you will want to set innodb_file_per_table as soon as possible on a new install. Otherwise the file /var/lib/mysql/ibdata will begin to grow to the size of what ever data is in your tables. You cannot shrink the size of this file without dropping and recreating your tables so it is best to enable this option early on to prevent ending up with a giant file that you can't easily shrink.